by S L Farrell
“You speak treason again, Archigos?” she asked, just as quietly.
“I speak truth, A’Hirzg.”
“And those here that you speak of. Would you be among those, Archigos?”
His fingers tightened on hers. “I would. Perhaps… perhaps it is possible for both the Coalition and the Faith to even become one again-under the right leaders.”
The right Archigos being yourself, of course… Allesandra watched the dancers on the floor, moving through their intricate and preordained steps. What does he really know? What does he really want? She didn’t know how to answer him. She didn’t know if he knew about the message she’d been sent from Nessantico, or if he’d perhaps received something similar. She didn’t know whether Semini was a potential ally or her enemy-and the Archigos could be a terrible enemy, as the skeletons of Numetodo heretics hanging in the gibbets near the Brezno Temple could attest.
The ice was gone to water in her drink. She gave the glass to a passing servant and smiled at the Archigos. “My vatarh believed that there would be one Holdings again-when he sat on the Sun Throne as Kraljiki,” she told him. “That’s what I believe also, Archigos: that a Hirzgai could also be the Kralji. And I…” She lifted the hand that had held the glass. She could see cool, glistening drops of water clinging to her fingers. “When last I checked, I was not Hirzgin.”
“No, you are not,” Semini answered. “But-”
She cut him off even as he opened his mouth again. “No, I am not,” she said. “That seems to be Cenzi’s Will. You wouldn’t intend to thwart Him, would you, Archigos?” She gave him no chance to respond. She removed her hand from his arm and gave him the sign of Cenzi. “Thank you for the drink and for the conversation, Archigos,” she said. “You’ve given me much to think about. If… if something would happen to, well, change things, I know that you and I might make excellent allies. Certainly you are a far more competent Archigos than the one the Nessantican Faith has named. Kenne never impressed me.”
She saw the pleasure in his face as she said that, and he nodded slightly. “I’m flattered, A’Hirzg.”
“No,” she told him, “it’s I who should be flattered. Now… you should find Francesca, and I must go be my husband’s wife and the A’Hirzg, and pretend not to notice when the A’Gyula slips away for the night.”
Karl ca’Vliomani
Varina handed Karl the glass ball as Mika watched. Varina’s touch lingered on Karl’s hand for a moment before she released him, and she gave him a smile that was tinged with sadness. Her face seemed more heavily lined than he remembered, as if she’d aged suddenly in the last month.
They were in the meeting hall of the Numetodo House, where once a week the various Numetodo would give reports on their research. There were empty chairs set neatly in rows in front of the small dais on which they stood.
Karl hadn’t mentioned to Mika his visit to the Firenzcian Ambassador the other day; evidently Varina hadn’t either, since Mika hadn’t commented on it.
“It’s just a ball, right?” Mika asked as Karl hefted the globe in his palm. “Though a fairly well-crafted one.” It was heavy and well-cast-Karl could see no air bubbles or defects in the glass: the lens of the sphere gave him a distorted, warped view of the hall. “Do you find it unusual or notable in any other way?”
Karl shrugged. “No. It’s a true glasswright’s work, or an apprentice’s proof-work, but otherwise…”
Mike grinned. “Indeed. What I want you to do, Karl, is speak the word ‘open’ in Paeti and then toss the ball to me.”
Karl hefted the glass again. “Oscail,” he said, and underhanded the small globe in Mika’s direction. What happened next astonished him.
When the glass ball touched Mika’s hand, a coruscation of blue-white flared, sending black shadows dancing around the Numetodo hall, painting momentary crazed black shadows on the back wall and causing Karl to shade his eyes belatedly. He heard Varina’s quick laugh and a handclap of delight. Karl blinked, trying to see through the globules of fading afterimages that haunted his vision. “By all the Moitidi… You two have been working, I see.”
“Not me,” Mika answered. “It’s been Varina alone.” He handed the globe back to Karl-it was simply glass again. “If the Westlanders were able to enchant objects with the Scath Cumhacht, the way you and Ana said Mahri did, then we knew it was possible. And not only that-Mahri gave Ana an enchanted object that she could control by speaking the right word. Anyone could use the magic as long as they know the release word.”
Varina was still smiling. She was rubbing at a long, scabbed wound on her forearm. “We knew it was possible; the rest was simply a matter of figuring out the formula to do it.”
“Varina’s finally managed to puzzle out the sequence,” Mika added. “She swore me to secrecy; said she wanted to surprise you. The spell’s complicated, and takes more time and more energy than you might think. Compared to our own spells, something like this is expensive and far more of a drain on the body than anyone expected, but…” He nodded happily. “It’s reproducible. Finally. Varina says she could teach us, and either of us could do the same.”
Karl glanced at Varina, who nodded without saying anything. She held his gaze almost defiantly. He tossed the ball up in the air. “That’s impressive, Varina. It truly is. But a flash of light is hardly a weapon.”
“Theoretically, any spell within the arcana could be stored in any object: offensive, defensive, whatever,” Varina answered. There was heat in her words. “Theoretically. Practically, well, not yet. I used the light spell because it’s the first and simplest thing we teach an initiate, so it seemed best.” She shook her head. There were white strands in her brown hair that Karl didn’t remember from even a week ago-had they been there all along? “Look, it’s a matter of binding the spell to the object and creating a trigger to activate it-covering the object in the energy of the Scath Cumhacht the way you’d wrap a mistfruit in paper. After that, it’s as if the object is an extension of the spellcaster, though the object itself has to be of good quality or it can’t survive the strain. It took me a while to understand that. But…” She sighed, spreading her hands wide. “Just putting that simple spell in an object was incredibly exhausting, Karl. You won’t be able to imagine just how exhausting until you try it yourself. The process took me three full turns of the glass, and afterward I had to rest for another day to recover. Even now, I still feel the drain on my energy, and I wonder what else it might have cost.” She bit her lower lip, brushed stray wisps of whitened hair behind her ears. “You said that Archigos Ana claimed that old Mad Mahri gave her an enchantment that could literally stop time?”
Karl nodded. “That’s what she told me-it was how she snatched Allesandra from her vatarh. And Mahri was able to switch his body for mine, when I was in the Bastida. His magic…”
“… was utterly beyond ours, then,” she finished for him. “I know. The reports from the war in the Hellins hint at the same. The nahualli of the Westlanders can do more than we can, but… I’ve just proved that their X’in Ka is no more god-driven than the Ilmodo, no matter what they claim or believe.” She pointed to the glass ball. “If I can do this, then my bet is that we can also learn to do the same with more potent spells. It’s just a matter of learning the right formulae to bind the Scath Cumhacht to the physical object. It can be done. We can do it.”
Karl remembered Mahri, who had befriended him and Ana when they thought they were lost, and who had turned out to be not ally, but enemy. Mahri’s ravaged, one-eyed, and furrowed face swam before him as he gazed at Varina. He lifted the glass ball again. “So anyone could have done this spell…” His voice trailed off. The explosion.. . the great flash of terrible light… Ana’s torn body… Magic without hearing or seeing anyone casting the spell… Maybe you’ve been wrong; maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong direction… “Could what happened to Ana have been…?” Karl couldn’t finish the question. It remained lodged in his throat, heavy and solid.
&n
bsp; But both Varina and Mika nodded in answer.
“Yes,” Mika told him. “That’s the rest of what we wanted to talk about. Varina and I have already had the same thought. Westlander involvement can’t be ruled out in Ana’s death, and frankly, what happened there makes it seem likely to me. But why, Karl? Why not assassinate the Kraljiki or the Regent, who are directly responsible for the war? Why kill Ana, of all people?”
Because it would be revenge for Mahri. Revenge. That, he could understand. “Right now, I don’t know,” Karl hedged. “But someone here in Nessantico does, I’m certain, and I’m going to find that person.” He took a long breath. They were both staring at him, and he hated the pity he saw in Mika’s eyes, and the deep empathy in Varina’s. “But that’s for later,” he told them. “For now, I want you to teach me this nahualli trick. Let me see how it works.”
Varina seemed to start to say something, then closed her mouth. Mika glanced at her, at Karl. “I think I’ll leave that to the two of you,” he said. “Alia wanted me to bring some lamb home for dinner, and the butcher will be closing his shop soon.” He made his farewells quickly and left them.
For too long after the door shut, neither of them spoke. When they did speak, it was together.
“I’m really sorry about the other day…”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said…”
They laughed, a little uneasily, at the collision of apologies. “You first,” Karl told her, but she shook her head. “All right,” he said. “I’ll start then. You said that my… affection for Ana had blinded me. I’ve been thinking about that, and-”
“Stop, Karl” she said. “Don’t say anything. I was angry and I said things that I had no right to say. I’d… I’d like you to forget them.”
“Even if they were true?”
Her cheeks reddened. “You loved Ana. I know that. Whatever relationship the two of you had…” She shrugged. “It’s not my concern.” She stepped forward, in front of him, close enough that he could see the flecks of color in her pupils and the fine lines at their corners. She reached down and closed his fingers around the glass ball he was still holding, both her hands cupping his. “I can show you how to enchant this. You just have to be patient because-”
“Varina.” She stopped and looked up at him. “You shouldn’t be putting so much of yourself into this.”
Her lips tightened as if she wanted to say something. Then her hands pressed against his again and she looked down. “… because it’s difficult, and you have to think differently about the whole process. But once you make the shift, it all makes sense,” she said. “You have to imagine the ball as an extension of yourself…”
Eneas cu’Kinnear
It had been three days since his capture. In that time, the Westlander army had continued marching northeast, and Eneas had walked with them. He remained close to Niente-which he’d learned was indeed the name of the nahualli who had healed him. “No one will restrain you,” Niente said to Eneas at the start of their trek. “But if you are found wandering without me, the warriors will kill you immediately. It’s your choice.”
They were moving in the direction of Munereo. The days were filled with nothing but walking. Eneas stayed close to the nahualli, but he also watched carefully for an opportunity to escape-that was his duty as a soldier. Whatever Niente had done to his leg had healed his injuries completely; his ankle felt stronger than it had ever been. If there was a chance to slip away, well, it wouldn’t be an injury that impeded him.
It wouldn’t be easy. All those of the nahualli caste walked together in the middle of the army, surrounded on all sides by the tattooed and scarred soldiers of the Westlanders, well-protected. That spoke of the value that the Tehuantin placed on the sorcerers. Each of the nahualli carried a walking stick or staff: carved with animal figures and highly polished, most of them showing long use. Once, when they had paused for the midday meal, Eneas reached out to touch Niente’s staff, curious as to what it might feel like. Niente snatched the stick away.
“This is nothing for you, Easterner,” he said-quietly, but with a sharp edge in his voice. “Let me give you a warning: you touch a nahualli’s staff at your peril. Don’t do it again.”
Niente conversed with the other nahualli, but always in the Tehuantin language; if any of them, like Niente, also spoke Eneas’ language, they never displayed the skill. For the most part, the other nahualli ignored his presence at the side of Niente, their gazes sliding past him as if he were no more than a horse or a tent-pack. Twice a day, a low-caste warrior would hand Eneas a bowl of the mashed root-paste that seemed to be the staple food for the army; he ate it quickly and hungrily-it was never quite enough to satisfy the hunger fed by the long marches. Niente had also given him a waterskin, which he filled in the abundant small lakes and streams around the hilly region.
The army moved through the meandering valleys like a solid river, the verdant steep walls of the landscape containing them. And at night, when the army camped…
It was the lowest-caste warriors who always erected the nahualli’s tents-the nahualli themselves seemed to do little physical labor. Niente supervised the placement of several dozen casks in his personal tent each night, marked with symbols burned into the wood. There were four symbols that Eneas could discern. Niente didn’t seem overly concerned with most of them, but the ones marked with what looked like a winged dragon he watched carefully as they were placed, grimacing whenever one of the warriors set the cask down too hard, and scolding them when they did so. That first night, Niente opened several of the casks-he didn’t object when Eneas sidled closer to look over the nahualli’s shoulder. One cask was filled with chunks of what looked and smelled like burnt wood, another with a white powder, yet another with bright yellow crystals. Eneas peered most closely into the dragon-marked casks, to see that it was filled with a gray-black thick sand, glistening a bit in the moonlight.
He remembered that sand, strewn in circles on the ground. The thunder, the flash, the pain…
Each night, close together in the tent, Niente would sit erect and chant for a few turns of the glass at least, his eyes closed, while Eneas lay near him. Sometimes he would sprinkle one of the ingredients from the casks on the ground between them while he chanted. Eneas could feel the power of the Ilmodo in the air, causing the hair on his neck to rise and prickling his skin, and he prayed to Cenzi while Niente cast his spells, trying to offset with his prayers the heretical use of the Ilmodo. All around them there would be silence: none of the other nahualli were chanting as Niente did, and Eneas wondered at that. He also wondered at how-afterward-he seemed to feel a warmth inside himself, as if the sun’s radiance were filling his own lungs. Whatever spell Niente was casting, Eneas seemed to be affected by it.
He wondered if Niente felt the same warmth and energy, but the nahualli always seemed more exhausted than exhilarated by his efforts, and the man moaned as he slept, as if he were in pain and when he awoke in the morning, there were new lines on his face, like an old apple.
On the third night, after the chanting, rather than falling asleep as he usually did, Niente placed a small bronze bowl near the opening to the tent so that the light of the campfire fell on it. The bowl was decorated around the rim with a frieze of stylized people and animals, many of which Eneas didn’t recognize. As Eneas watched, Niente poured water into the bowl, then sifted a small amount of finely-ground, ruddy powder into his hand from a leather pouch. Niente dusted the surface of the water with the powder, chanting as he did so. The water began to glow, an unnatural, blue-green illumination that made the nahualli’s face appear spectral and dead. The man stared into the bowl, silent, the eerie light playing over his face, shifting and merging. Curiosity made Eneas slide forward to see better. Pushing himself up, he glanced over Niente’s shoulder.
Inside the bowl, in the water, was a cityscape. He recognized it immediately: Nessantico. He could see the Pontica a’Brezi Veste and the vista of the Avi a’Parete leading down to the
pillared, marble public entrance to the Kralj’s Palais. He could see the Old Temple, but cu’Brunelli’s magnificent new dome looked as if it had fallen in completely; there was nothing but a blackened hole there where it was to have been placed. People seemed to be walking the streets, but they were few, most with their heads down and hurrying as if afraid to be seen. The streets were trash-filled and dirty, and the palais had a visible crack on its southern wall and the northern wing was a ruin. Across the street, what had been a glorious residence was now a blackened hulk. A pall of smoke seemed to lay over the city. Eneas leaned closer to see better into the water…
… and Niente’s fingers stirred the water and the vision dissolved, the light going dark. Eneas was staring down only at water, the brass bottom of the bowl flecked with the granules of powder.
“What was that?” Eneas asked Niente, sitting back. The man shrugged.
“Heresy, to you,” he said. “The magic of the wrong god.”
“I saw… I thought I saw… Nessantico.”
“Perhaps you did,” Niente answered. “Axat grants the visions She wishes.”
“Visions of what?” He remembered the smoke, the fissure in the palais wall, the hurrying, frightened people…
Niente didn’t answer Eneas. He cast the water in the bowl outside the tent and wiped the bowl with the hem of his clothes. He placed it in his pack, next to the cotton padding that served as his bed. “How do you feel, Eneas?” he asked.
“I feel fine,” he answered.
“It’s time you returned to your own people.”
“What?” Eneas shook his head, unbelieving. “You said-”